Mike Smyth: Small B.C. Conservative party had big impact on election

Leah McCulloch of Comox was the B.C. Conservative party candidate in Courtenay-Comox in the 2017 provincial election.Submitted / PNG

A lot of B.C. Liberals are furious at Leah McCulloch these days because she ran in last week’s provincial election as a member of the B.C. Conservative party.

The Conservatives are a broke, leaderless, barely organized outfit scuttling around the fringes of the B.C. political scene. They ran just 10 candidates provincewide.

But McCulloch still managed to get 2,061 votes in Courtenay-Comox, the crucial riding where the NDP beat the governing Liberals by just nine votes in the preliminary results.

The Liberals ended up with 43 seats on election night — one short of a majority in the 87-seat legislature — and now some Liberals see McCulloch as the vote-splitting spoiler who denied majority power to Christy Clark.

“There’s a lot of hate coming my way,” said McCulloch, a 53-year-old dietitian who ran for political office for the first time.

“They think the Liberals would have won the riding if there hadn’t been a Conservative candidate on the ballot. They’re probably right, but they have only themselves to blame, not me.”

McCulloch said she decided to run in the election because she was sick of watching what Clark’s Liberals were doing to the province.

She was particularly angry about the Liberals’ refusal to stop accepting unlimited corporate donations, including $10,000 to have dinner with Clark in a private home.

“I watched them rake in millions of dollars from real-estate developers while the cost of housing went through the roof,” she said. “I decided to do something about it.”

Because the Conservatives have no money, she had to self-finance her own campaign. She won’t say how much she spent, but it was enough to rent a campaign office, put up lawn signs, run some local newspaper ads and put up a billboard at the local auto-racing speedway.

“She is a nice person, very well-spoken, a hard worker and she got more than seven per cent of the vote,” said Jim Benninger.

“If it wasn’t for that vote-splitting, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

The Liberals hope they can take the Courtenay riding back from the NDP when the remaining absentee ballots are unsealed and counted next week.

Everything is on the line in that final count. If the Liberals don’t manage to claw back their majority, the NDP and the third-place Green party could team up to topple Clark’s Liberals on a non-confidence motion.

“Some people are already blaming me for that,” McCulloch said. “But I have no regrets. I ran because I wanted to hold the Liberals accountable and now that’s exactly what’s happening.

“No matter how it all ends up, they will have to look at themselves, how they have governed and how they have treated people. And that’s a good thing.”

The Liberals did not consider the Conservatives much a threat before the election.

But this small party ended up having a big impact in one riding that could ultimately decide who becomes premier and which party, or parties, end up governing the province.

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